Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Essay: Three

“Often when I read examples of what purport to be lyric essays, I …find them resembling a certain kind of experimental poetry that has proliferated for at least forty years…There tends to be a reliance on structural, conceptual devices, such as lists or repeating word-phrases, a welcoming of stream-of-conscious, surrealist disjunctive leaps from line to line, and a suppression of mounting argument, replaced by circularity or trance… “